Mart Muller's Weblog

This might be an eye-opener for a lot of people that want to get to know SharePoint 2007: the SharePoint 2007 Product Guide!

“SharePoint Server 2007 delivers new and improved features in the areas of portal, search, content management, business processes, and business intelligence. This enterprise portal server can help streamline business processes and make information easy to share through integration with familiar desktop applications and tools.

This product guide provides an overview of SharePoint Server 2007, with an emphasis on new and improved features. It also takes a close look at SharePoint Server 2007 in action, demonstrating its exciting new capabilities. Download this document to learn more about SharePoint Server 2007.

Included in this document:
Introduction

• How to Use This Guide
• Product Overview
• Top 10 Benefits
• Features at a Glance
• Architectural Overview
• Installing Your Evaluation Server
• Product Tour
• An Administrator’s Perspective
• A Developer’s Perspective
• For More Information
• Appendix A—Hardware and Software Requirements”

By the way, there is a new Office site on Microsoft.com.

I was planning to write something about content types, but thanks to Mark for mentioning I ran into Martin’s blog, where this is very well explained. So, from Martin, ‘What are Content Types?’:

“A content type is an object that is stored within MOSS that defines several elements of a piece of content, including:

• Document Template that the content will be based on
• Columns that the content will have associated with it (metadata)
• Workflows that the content will use
• Information Management policies that apply to the content
• Conversion types for the content”

Read the whole explanation here

I’ve been writing some SharePoint tips over the last year and a half. With Office SharePoint 2007 being made, I thought it would be a good idea to write ‘about the things I’ve heard’ on Office 2007. This time it will be versioning:

The versioning mechanism is quite improved in the new version of SharePoint. Introducing major and minor versions, where a major version is a published version, a minor is in progress to become a published version.

This is kind of how the scenario will be like:

• Document with version 1.0 is a public version, everyone can see.
• Document is checked out for editing, version 1.1 is created which only editor(s) can see (version 3.0 is still visible for readers).
• Document is checked in, version 1.2.
• Document is published, version 2.0 is created, visible for everyone.

To enable versions, go to the list settings and adjust the settings:

Doc. lib. settings

Context menu for document

Check-in

Version history

Other ‘features’ for document libraries which I will probably talk write about later: show differences between documents, version trimming, version (item) level security, document conversion and ‘OnAfter’ AND ‘OnBefore’ event support.

Microsoft confirmed the timeline for release and availability of its 2007 Microsoft Office system. The company remains on track to complete work on the 2007 Microsoft Office system in October of this year and is planning to make the product available to the business customers through the volume licensing program in October 2006. Retail and OEM availability of the product are scheduled to coincide with the retail and OEM availability of the Windows Vista operating system in January 2007.

Source

It’s been an interesting week! I saw a lot of good sessions and I can’t wait to put some more time in developing on SharePoint Offce 2007. I’ve got many answers I has about this, but there also are some new questions that I have to find out. Some of the best things I’ve seen this week:

• Improved search
• Business data catalog
• Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Services
• Custom Templates
• Features

I met some people as well for blog-o-sphere: Maurice, Lawrence, Matthew, Steen, Bjarne, Andrew and Mike. I’ve had lunch with them on thursday which was good.

Anyway, to finish with an ‘inside joke’…

Today I attended a session about the SharePoint Business Data Catalog (BDC). I think this is one of the biggest steps forward in the new SharePoint version. The BDC basically is a layer between data sources (ado.net or xml) and the SharePoint core elements like webparts, lists, search and custom applications.

The benefits are that you can REALLY integrate your business data into your SharePoint environment, without writing any code… well, you have to write a (xml) data definition file with the source entities and relations. A tool for generating it will not be shipped by Microsoft, so there is an opportunity for 3rd party developers here.

So, once defined the xml, it is just a matter of importing it into the BDC in the SharePoint UI and the data will become available on several places:

• Some business data webparts (for showing data in master detail and related views)
• SharePoint Search, which is one of the coolest things: you can easily add a new tab to the sharepoint search center for searching for the new content types.
• SharePoint List, is in custom colums
• Programatically, to integrate the data into webparts and applications, preserving security and business logic.

One of the problems with the BDC is data synchronisation. This must be done manually when data is altered. So, there could be ‘old’ data available in SharePoint. You’ll have to write a mechanism to update the catalog automatically. There is a sync button in the SharePoint fields to update it, but it seems like it is not the perfect way to deal with it.

So, I personally am very happy to be able to integrate external data sources like CRM or other databases that easily. Can’t wait to try it out myself (probably tonight)!

For the people that wonder how to call the new version of SharePoint (or SPS, or WSS), Lawrence, who I actually met and have lunch with today, explains which abbreviations and namings can be used for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

“For starters, one of the most important yet challenging aspects of community is to ensure that everyone is using the same abbreviations and acronyms when referring to a product or technology. So, this past Monday, I sent the following naming guidelines for Office SharePoint Server 2007 to our external SharePoint MVPs as well as a broad mix of SharePoint oriented internal Microsoft people. I’d encourage you to adhere to these guidelines as best you can.

• Initial (formal) mention: Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007
• Initial (informal) mention: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Second mention (lengthy content: more than 250 words): Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Second mention (short content: e-mails, etc. – though having the “Office” prefix is still strongly preferred): SharePoint Server 2007
• Acronym (long form – must be defined in conjunction with initial mention of the product name): MOSS 2007
• Acronym (short form – must be defined in conjunction with initial mention of the product name): MOSS

Although the guidelines above include the use of an acronym, it’s important to note that we do not officially recommend the use of it because 1) it doesn’t work in all languages, and 2) it can potentially diminish the Office brand. However, as we’ve seen with “WSS” and “SPS” in the past, the use of acronyms (and naming abbreviations) is unavoidable. Therefore, we need to be proactive in influencing the consistent and accurate use of an acronym for Office SharePoint Server 2007 – and MOSS, it is.”

[Edit: style layout]

As you can read in Bill Gates’ speach on monday at the DevCon 2006, a new platform is opened called OpenXmlDeveloper.org. It’s a good resource for eveything that has tgo with open xml standards like the new Office XML File formats.

“The OpenXmlDeveloper.org web site was announced this morning by Bill Gates during his keynote presentation at the Microsoft Office Developer's Conference. The site is the home for a new community, the Open XML Developer Group. This group is dedicated to helping its members developer software that supports the Open XML Formats on a wide variety of platforms.

The Open XML Formats are currently going through the Ecma standards process, and the complete schemas are not yet available. There are no technical articles that have been published yet (other than blog posts, some of which are great), and there are no books out on Open XML Formats development yet”

Last night we had a attendee party at the EMP in Seattle, near the Space Needle. I had a lot of fun with Matt, Andrew, the aliens and the Rockaoke. Some impressions:

Matthew and me

The alian-vsto-coctail-glasses

And the Space Needle

I met Steen and Bjarne this morning at the EMEA breakfast session and all the SharePoint bloggers are going to have lunch today, which will be very cool. There was some sort of Q&A with people from MS. An interesting thing is that the Office 2007 release planning is not affected by the delay of Vista. The Vista delay is a packaging delay, so its still set for Q4 this year.

It’s still in alfa, but the SharePoint team announced a Visual Studio 2005 add-on for developing SharePoint solutions: “Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint Services”. The features (I actually saw them working ):

• Add sharepoint project type
• Item templates, site definitions (webparts, definitions, event handlers, features, workflow activities)
• Build, deploy, debug options
• WSS xsd for xml intellisense
• Utility for export content db’s
• Deploying for development: build and everyting is added and set in SharePoint (webpart in gallery, safe controls, etc) 

Also this is something we’ve been looking for about 3 years?  Way to go!

I saw a session today about search in Office SharePoint 2007 which was a really good one. They talked and showed a lot of things you can do with search in the new version. The keyword here is relevance.

Some points about what is improved (and what we’ve been looking for!):

• RSS in search. support to subscribe to search queries
• A set of (new) webparts: core results (results webpart), dataform webpart, high confidance match, statistics, pagination (paging), search box, best bets and… hidden shared object (for the logic for all webparts)
• Drill down supported! For example on document type.
• AND/OR/NOT/Phrase support (i.e. “chocolate coveres” –frog)
• Freetext(), and/or/not, contains(), like, order by acs|desc operators in SQL syntax search
• Only one index, which is backward compatible in 2007.
• The search webservice is also backwards compatible.
• Really simple query’s (i.e. “carol scope:people” or “carol site:www.microsoft.com”).
• A lot of properties to set in the search webparts!

There is a lot more to talk about this topic, but it is clear that a lot of things have been improved!

Via Maurice and Steen.

For the ones who are attending the Office devcon and are SharePoint bloggers, there is a SharePoint blogger lunch on the 23rd. Drop Maurice a line if you want to join.

The full transcript of Bill Gates’ keynote can be found here.

Just a small pice:

“The 2007 Office system has a number of elements in it. Probably the people here have seen as we've come on we're adding to each of these areas. The tools themselves, of course, big improvements, the Office Online Services, the client software in Office, and then, of course, the strength of the server piece, which I would say has grown dramatically in this release. The role of SharePoint, and you are going to hear about that, as the basis for this new class of applications, the basis for a new way of being able to share information, I think that will be a very, very strong change that you'll hear throughout the several days here.

The breadth of what we've done in Office 2007, even I think is quite amazing. If we'd only done the XML, that would have been a huge thing. If we'd only done user interface, or the neat new features, any of those would have been fantastic, but the most important is the idea of this new platform, making it very easy through templates to build the collaborative, information sharing applications. Even concepts like blogging or Wikipedias are just simply there, and you can pull it into the SharePoint environment to have your users use these modern approaches for working together, and yet it can be in the context of the project that they're working on, or the issue that's being debated with the structured information and unstructured information all there in one simple place.

So, the scenarios we really think we've made a breakthrough on includes business intelligence, collaboration, content management, and business process integration. And yet, we've done that without having separate tools for each one of those things. We've essentially taken on the server level SharePoint, and of course the Office client on the PC itself as the way that a lot of those scenarios can be addressed. So, it's in a sense standardizing and greatly simplifying the creation of a world class of applications that in most cases we're either very hard to do or just simply didn't get done at all. “

Bill (sorry for poor quality)

As you can read here and here, the NDA on Office 2007 had dropped yesterday. The upcomming months you will see lots of it on all the blogs. Whahoo!

From microsoft.com:

“The March 2006 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office "v3", planned for the next version of Microsoft Visual Studio ("Orcas").

Note: This CTP requires you to have the Beta 1 Technical Refresh of Microsoft Office 2007. Only customers currently registered with the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 1 program (including the Office Developer Conference 2006 attendees) are able to install this CTP. If you are not one of them, there will be another release of this CTP coming later this spring that will be available for installation by the general public.

The primary goal of this CTP is to give Microsoft Office 2007 beta 1 technical refresh developers an early glimpse at some of the key new features and feature directions in the area of Office programmability. The upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2007 introduces a number of new technologies intended to further establish Microsoft Office as a powerful and flexible solution development platform.

The next version of Visual Studio Tools for Office is designed to help developers take better advantage of those new capabilities in Office 2007, as well as to provide additional infrastructure to ensure .NET solutions in Office run more reliably, efficiently and securely.

The highlights of this CTP include:

• Support for the new Office Open XML file formats in Microsoft Office 2007
• Support for the new UI ( “ribbon”) extensibility model in Microsoft Office 2007
• Add-In projects for Microsoft Access 2007, Microsoft Excel 2007, Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007, Microsoft InfoPath 2007, Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft Project 2007, Microsoft Publisher 2007, Microsoft Visio 2007, and Microsoft Word 2007
• Support for the new application-level customizable taskpane”

Download here

It’s been a few days since my last posting, but I’ve been really busy flying to Seattle, listening to Bill and creating WSS 2007 webparts, which is by the way, really cool.

So first day at the Office System DevCon 2006 was really great. I’ve seen some good in depth sessions about WSS 3. Lot’s of the new functionality is already known in the community, but it’s really good to see them in action, and creating them your own.

So, some of my favorite things I’ve seen and done so far:

• Column templates and custom types and the way you make them global (or not) through a SPFarm or SPSite
• Features, and the way they are deployed
• Events, on SPList or SPSite (!!) and especially the before events. Imagine making a backup of a site before it is deleted, automatically.
• The Business Data Catalog, a layer between data sources (XML/ado.net) and SharePoint (lists, webparts, user profiles, search)
• Brand new content migration API, to migrate content (lists, sites etc) from one place to the other.
• SPJobDefinition, for creating scheduled jobs
• The major/minor versioning of list items, which is something a lot of customers have been waiting for.
• And last but not least, SPAudit, for auditing tracking.

So far a lot of great things, which I can’t wait to test out myself! More to come, soon…

For the ones who are invited in the beta program: the technical refresh of Office beta 1 is available!

Currently, the site is hardly working probably because of the number betatesters that want to download it. I’m on 48% with the client right now

A new message from the SharePoint team about rollup webparts in the new SharePoint version. Currently it is clear that in some cases it is a problem to find ‘my’ information in all the SharePoint sites that I’m working in. The rollup webparts that will be available on both the MySite and any other sites.

“On My Site (personal roll-up)
The first one is the SharePoint Sites (the name may change by RTM) web part. This web part is meant to be used in your personal site, and it automatically rolls up all the documents created, modified, checked-out to you as well as tasks assigned to you in every site that you are a Member of.

Each site shows up as a "tab" and will show you the documents and tasks assigned to you. In addition, you can manually add additional tabs that point to any SharePoint site.

In Office SharePoint Server, there is a user and membership sync engine that figures out which sites you are a Member of. The engine requires that the user explicitly be in the Members group of that site. The SharePoint Create Site and User Management UI allows you to provision and manage this group by default.

On any SharePoint Site (Generic Rollup)
A second web part called Sites Rollup (name may change for RTM) can be used on any SharePoint site (Team site, Document workspace, etc.). This web part allows you to create tabs to each site you want to show and also allows you to specify a rollup page in those sites. It does not automatically populate the list of sites based on who is viewing the part.”

Read the complete article

Office 2007 TR1 beta will be ready for betatesters next week (I’m in! ). Some changes again in the UI of the client applications. For a quick preview, visit the following links on Jensens blog:

• Word: http://blogs.msdn.com/photos/jensenh/images/547376/original.aspx
• Excel: http://blogs.msdn.com/photos/jensenh/images/547377/original.aspx
• Outlook: http://blogs.msdn.com/photos/jensenh/images/547379/original.aspx

Via news.com:

“Microsoft plans to ship a new preview release of Office 2007 next week, a company representative said Wednesday. Formerly known by its Office 12 codename, Office 2007 is the next version of Microsoft's ubiquitous productivity software, due by year's end. The new preview is a "technical refresh" of the first beta release of the software, the representative said.

The updated beta changes to the user interface, bug fixes and other changes to make it more stable. Microsoft had said before that it planned significant changes to the way users find commands in Office, which can now be buried deep in menus. The beta refresh will be available only to the about 10,000 participants in a private testing program. Microsoft released the initial beta of Office 2007 in November. A second, public beta is planned for this spring.“

Jan is doing some sessions at the DevDays in Belgium and The Netherlands today and tomorrow. Too bad I’m not there to get one of the U2U T-Shirts .

Good luck with your sessions Jan!

Use the search box sample to customize the Windows SharePoint Services site-level Search box to return Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Search (SharePointPSSearch) results. This download contains sample Microsoft Visual C# code for creating the custom search box and a deployment package (CAB file) for installing the sample. You can modify this sample code to fit your needs.

Download here

It’s been a while since I released a beta version of my WikiSharePoint application. I’ve had a lot of responses on that application and questions when a new version would be released. Well, here it is!

There are some changes and a lot bug fixes, and this time I created an installer for easy deployment.

The application is based on a thesaurus list, which is created automatically by one of the WikiSharePoint web parts. In this (Sharepoint) list, keywords and synonyms can be inserted with a parent-child relation. This way, a thesaurus list can be filled which is searchable as well.

Results are editable by users with the edit rights. This way, the thesaurus list will be filled and updated constantly.

Features
WikiSharePoint 1.0 comes with 3 web parts:

• Tam Tam WikiSharePoint, which creates the list for you if you like and displays the results.
  • Automatically create thesaurus
  • Finds other terms in the results and makes them clickable
  • Tooltips with descriptions
  • Shows path and more specific items
  • Terms editable form the result page for users with edit rights
  • Insert new items from the web part menu
• Search in WikiSharePoint, which is a control that searches the thesaurus.
  • Can be used on any area or WSS site, pointing to thesauri on other places as well
  • Can be used as search box in SPS

• Tam Tam WikiSharePoint Treeview, which displays the thesaurus in a tree view.
  • Displays all items in hierarchical way
  • Collapse and expand items
  • View items by clicking on them
  • Add new items from the web part menu

Enjoy!

File Attachment: TamTam WikiSharePoint_installer.zip (94 KB)